Textile company has reunion of sorts

Strolling down memory lane

Posted: Thursday, April 10, 2003

By Lee Shearerlshearer@onlineathens.com

Thomas J. Swartz Jr., former president of the Thomas Textile Co., traveled from his home in Newark, N.J., to talk about company history and visit some of the people he worked with before the plant closed in 1988. The Thomas Textile mill, along the North Oconee River off Whitehall Road, once made baby clothes and has since been converted to apartments.R.C. Rique/Staff

It was billed as a historical lecture by the former president of the Thomas Textile Co., but it was more of a family reunion at the Athens-Clarke County Library Wednesday evening.

Nearly 50 former employees of the mill beside the North Oconee River came to hear former president Thomas Swartz Jr. talk about the history of Thomas Textile, which made children's and infant wear.

After 76 years, the company went out of business in 1988, closing the doors for good on the Whitehall Road plant beside the river. The factory building, which dates back a century, was later converted into apartments.

But the people at the library Wednesday night remembered it when it was a bustling business employing hundreds of people.

''I loved it. I loved sewing, and I loved the people,'' said Lucy Mitchell of Athens, one of the workers who returned to see friends and co-workers they hadn't seen in years. Mitchell worked there from 1972 until it closed in 1988, and two of her daughters also worked there.

''It was a good place to work, it really was,'' said Mitchell's friend, Corine Walter of Athens, recalling the days she'd sit at her sewing machine, looking down at the peaceful sight of the North Oconee.

Walter went on to work at the University of Georgia and several other Athens employers, but never found a job she liked as much - and it wasn't just the holiday barbecues and the year-end bonuses, she said.

''If you had a problem, you go talk it out, and they'd really listen to you. We didn't realize how good it was until it closed,'' Walter said.

''It was sad. Part of my life was gone,'' said Vickie Hembree, who worked there from the time she was 17 until she was 50 and the plant closed.

For many, like Vickie Coker Daniel, Wednesday night's gathering was literally a family reunion. Besides Daniel, her mother, mother-in-law, sister and husband worked at Thomas Textile, along with various aunts and cousins - several of whom attended a reception that preceded Swartz's talk at the library.

Daniel's family lived in the Whitehall community, and the plant was almost like home to her - as children, she and her sister could just walk over to the plant if they needed to tattle on a sibling, she laughed.

''We'd sell candy to the workers, trying to make money as kids,'' and one year, they used the money to buy Easter dresses, Daniel said.

The company was founded in 1921 in Orange, N.J., by Swartz's father, who began making diapers using his mother's sewing machine, Swartz told a crowd of nearly 75 people.

The company moved to Athens in the early 1930s and remained until it closed its doors in 1988, forced out of business by cheap foreign labor like so many other Southern textile mills, he said.

''We had a glorious run,'' he said. ''The wonderful people in Whitehall were always proud of the fact that they made an excellent product for the price.''

Thus ended a manufacturing history that stretches back to 1827, when a group of businessmen started Georgia's first textile mill on this very same site. That business folded in 1930, Swartz said.